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Bread Fried for Soup
Take 1 or 2 slices of stale bread a quarter of an inch thick. Remove the crust and cut them into small dice not more than a quarter of an inch square. Half fill an iron saucepan with frying fat, and let this boil, which it will do when it is still, and a blue smoke rises from it. Put the sippets, a few at a time, into a frying-basket, plunge them into the fat, and shake them about until they are a golden brown color. Turn them upon kitchen paper to free them from grease, take another spoonful and proceed as before, until a sufficient quantity of sippets are fried. Put the fried bread upon a dish covered with a napkin, and hand round with the soup. Sometimes the sippets are put into the soup tureen, and the soup is poured over them.
Also cut in diamond shapes, and prepared as the above, to use for garnishing (sippets).
Nineteenth-century croutons, under their older English name. The method is sound; only the fat-temperature test needs replacing.
- Ignore the blue-smoke testFat that is visibly smoking has passed its smoke point and will taste scorched. Use a thermometer and fry at 350-375F, which browns quarter-inch dice in a minute or less.
- Choose the fat accordinglyThe unspecified 'frying fat' would most likely have been beef dripping or lard, both of which tolerate this heat. Refined peanut, sunflower or rice bran oil behaves the same way; butter and unrefined oils will burn.
- SippetsAn old word for small pieces of bread served with soup or gravy, usually fried or toasted. The diamond-cut version at the end is the same thing shaped for garnish.
- Stale bread mattersDay-old crumb has lost enough moisture to crisp through rather than steam, and it holds a clean dice. Fresh bread tears under the knife and absorbs far more fat.
- Small batches, hot fatThe instruction to fry a few at a time is the hinge. Crowding the basket drops the temperature and the dice soak rather than fry; keep the surface of the fat moving.
- Depth of fatHalf-filling the pan is more than needed and more than is safe on a modern hob. Two to three inches in a deep, heavy pan gives the same result with less to boil over.
- Yield and timingTwo slices give somewhere around a cup of dice, enough for about four bowls. Fry them as close to serving as possible; they lose their crispness once they sit, and sooner still in a warm or humid kitchen.
- ServingHanded separately, they stay crisp. Put into the tureen under the soup and they will be soft by the second ladleful, which is sometimes the point in a thin consomme but rarely with a thick puree.